3TB hard drive prices slip below $150

Share This article

After selling for $250-$300 at their introduction about a year ago, 3TB hard drive prices are now falling below $150. This weekend, the Hitachi H3IK30003272SW, a 7200-rpm drive, is $149.99 at NewEgg.com, with a promo code.

If you want the Hitachi drive for under $150, go to NewEgg.com and search for the Hitachi part number (H3IK30003272SW) or model number (0S03208), then apply the promo code EMCKCJE76 (codes can be found by clicking on the current week’s promotions page). This is for a bare drive, meaning the drive and nothing else (no cables, no brackets, no installation CD), although that’s all you need to slide it in to an empty bay in an existing PC as long as you’ve got the right OS. There’s also a slower 5,400-rpm Hitachi 3TB drive for less (not worth the $10 savings) and an external 3TB drive.

The deal is nice to see, but we’re far more interested in how this is possible. How’d the drives get so capacious and how’d the prices fall so quickly?

There are two ways to reach 3TB in a 3.5-inch drive. One is to improve areal density. Seagate was the first to reach 1TB of storage per platter this spring with the Seagate Barracuda XT ST33000651AS three-platter drive. The platters have an areal density of 625 gigabits or 78GB per square inch. That’s the most technically elegant solution and it will set you back about $200 for a bare drive. The other way is via platter count. Western Digital has a Caviar 3TB drive that uses four platters, meaning it has 750GB of capacity per platter. The Hitachi employs five platters to reach 3TB, meaning each platter holds 600GB, with an areal density of about 47GB per square inch. Still, not bad to have 50GB of capacity in the footprint of a postage stamp.

While you might see high platter-count as complex, trailing-edge technology, Hitachi sees otherwise. (Or Hitachi believes the best defense is a good offense.) Hitachi suggests that drive-makers in general have early-on reliability issues when they first move to the next level in areal density. Putting five platters with proven areal density inside a 3.5-inch drive housing has long been mastered.

Excited about 3TB drives? Bear this in mind:

As a data disk, Hitachi says 3TB drives are compatible with everything on the Windows side except 32-bit Windows XP and earlier, with Linux, and with Mac OS X 10.6. As a boot disk, Mac OS X and Linux work, as do 64-bit Windows 7 and 64-bit Windows Vista with an EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface) patch. But no matter — you really should have a separate boot drive (almost any size is big enough) for the operating system and programs), and a separate drive for data. Also keep in mind that some external 3TB drives may actually be a pair of 1.5TB drives in a single housing. Not many, but it pays to check.

Drives larger than 2.2TB don’t work easily with older operating systems such as Windows XP, some can’t be used to boot your PC, and some (Hitachi) get to 3TB by adding more platters. None of those are issues with 2TB drives.

The best bang for the buck right now is the 2TB drive, which was introduced at $200-$300 but dropped down to $99 a year ago, just as the first 3TB drives showed (not a coincidence). Now they sell for as little as $75. That’s half the price for two-thirds the capacity.

No matter whether you get 2TB or 3TB, you’ll want two of them, so you’ve got all your data safely stored in two places. Otherwise you’d need more than 300 double-layer DVDs to back it up.

Tagged In

Post a Comment

“There’s also a slower 5,400-rpm Hitachi 3TB drive for less (not worth the $10 savings)”
What kind of niche market are they aiming for with this product?

http://www.mrseb.co.uk Sebastian Anthony

As SSDs come down in price, a 3TB drive makes an ideal backup/bulk data drive — and for storing files, 5,400 RPM is more than enough :)

Andrew Weisz

The “niche” you refer to is huge. Lots of people just want lots of space for backup. Not speed. Data speed is capped typically by USB or ethernet anyways. You don’t see many people running around with huge external SAS/SATA arrays and if you do, they buy the stupid expensive drives anyways.

Andrew Weisz

The “niche” you refer to is huge. Lots of people just want lots of space for backup. Not speed. Data speed is capped typically by USB or ethernet anyways. You don’t see many people running around with huge external SAS/SATA arrays and if you do, they buy the stupid expensive drives anyways.

Anonymous

Video storage, HD stuff is rumored to be pretty large. backups. All in one place.

Anonymous

Slower drive = greener drive (uses less electricity). Put four in a RAID server and the speed would be masked by the network. The street price w/o the promo code would be $20-$30 different, maybe enough to create some space. – Bill Howard, Extreme Tech

http://zyberwoof.myopenid.com/ zyberwoof

Under $150? I see them around $120 all the time. Today Amazon has one for $107.

Use of this site is governed by our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Copyright 1996-2015 Ziff Davis, LLC.PCMag Digital Group All Rights Reserved. ExtremeTech is a registered trademark of Ziff Davis, LLC. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of Ziff Davis, LLC. is prohibited.